Cobalt provides founders with a long-term home for their business.

Many founders rightly fear the prospect of an acquisition. That’s because too often employees and customers get lost in the shuffle when financial engineering takes precedence over mission and values.

We do things differently.

OUR APPROACH

We built Cobalt to honor and build upon the legacies of exceptional founders.

Great businesses succeed because of their people. Founders trust us because we invest in their teams, do right by their customers, and uphold the missions and values that made their businesses great in the first place.

And we named ourselves Cobalt to honor the blue-collar workers who drive our businesses forward.

Our Values

How we show up with our founders, our teams, and our customers.

  • We believe advancing founders’ legacies is a privilege. We do right by our founders, teams, and customers in good times and in bad.

  • We hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards. We’re bold in our pursuits, don’t make excuses, and relentlessly empower each other to get the job done.

  • We’re honest with ourselves and others. We do what we say we’ll do, say what needs to be said, and search for the right answer regardless of where it comes from.

  • We’re always learning as individuals, as a team, and as a business. We show up humble, curious, and with the courage to change our minds.

  • We’re fired up by our mission, love our team, and don’t take either for granted. We show up authentically, assume best intent, and try not to take ourselves too seriously.

FAQs

  • We look for businesses with 1) $5m+ of revenue, 2) 70%+ of revenue from commercial access solutions products and services, and 3) longstanding customers with repeat revenue.

  • We base valuation on both the quantitative and qualitative components of your business. As our conversations progress, we will be upfront with you about what valuation might look like for your business based on everything we are seeing.

  • We can be flexible based on your goals and the circumstances of the business. We typically prefer simple transaction structures to complex ones, but can be flexible depending on the situation. Whatever structure the transaction ultimately takes, we will do our best to work with your tax and legal advisors to structure the deal in as tax efficient a manner as possible for both us and you.

  • The first step in our process is an introductory call to learn more about each other and mutually assess if there might be a fit. From there, we sign an NDA and review basic financial information. Assuming the data checks out, we then typically coordinate an in-person meeting to discuss the business with you in greater detail, walk through your facility (usually after hours), and get to know each other better over a meal.

    Once we reach an agreement on valuation, structure, and other key terms, we then typically submit a Letter of Intent (LOI) that outlines our offer. Once we receive a signed LOI, we typically can complete due diligence within 60 days.

  • We are backed with committed capital from Alpine Investors. Alpine’s investment model is built around its PeopleFirst philosophy, which means growing businesses by recruiting, developing, and engaging exceptional people.

  • Our goal is to buy great businesses and enable them to be even better. With that goal in mind, it wouldn’t make any sense for us to buy businesses looking to unravel teams, cultures, and customer relationships that have been built over many decades. It’s essential for the continued growth of your business that we retain key members of your team, honor your culture, and continue providing exceptional service to your customers.

  • No two situations are the same, so we like to operate with flexibility in crafting your role post-acquisition. Some business owners want to stick around (either in their exact same role, a different role, or in a part-time strategic advisory capacity), and some do not. We can generally work with you based on your preferences and the needs of the business.

  • In all but rare cases, nothing happens to your brand. Our philosophy is simple: we buy businesses with fantastic reputations in the market, so what good does it do us to replace those brands with an unfamiliar one like Cobalt? Customers of our businesses will continue to work with the brands that they know and love, as will employees.

  • The way we think about Cobalt is that our businesses are our customers, and everything we build at Cobalt is geared toward helping our businesses be bigger and better versions of themselves.

    You can think of Cobalt as a behind-the-scenes partner that provides services to your business such as: leadership recruiting and development, technician recruiting and training, technology implementation and strategy, digital marketing support, centralized procurement, and centralized back office support. This list goes on and will continue growing over time as we learn and add more businesses into the fold. The key principle is that our businesses are our customers, and everything we do is built to serve them.

  • Cobalt expects its businesses to operate independently, and that is by design. We do not intend to turn Cobalt into a big, bureaucratic, faceless company. Customers love our businesses because of their local feel, so why would we want to change that?

    That said, Cobalt does not intend to take a passive holding company approach with its businesses. We actively support our businesses so that they can operate with the resources of a national company, while preserving the local feel that employees and customers know and love.